Our computing degree show allows students from all computing courses to showcase their final poster presentations and skills to potential employers, industry professionals and the wider community. We had a chat to Daniel about his project that he’ll be showcasing at the event.
I’m currently working on a project that explores alternative input methods for games that make them more accessible to people with limited motor skills
Choosing the course
I always enjoyed Computer Science at GCSE and A-Level so was always going to do something related to that if I went to University. I also used to spend a lot of time remaking old games such as Pong, Snake etc., so I thought I’d find the Game Design focused course more enjoyable.
Making computer games more accessible
I’m currently working on a project that explores alternative input methods for games that make them more accessible to people with limited motor skills. Games are, as a standard, played with either a keyboard and mouse, or a controller which can be very difficult, or even impossible to use depending on the player. Finding usable alternative input methods will open a wider range of games up to a much larger playerbase.
There have been two members of staff who’ve particularly inspired me. Firstly, David D. has always helped a lot with every module I’ve had him for, and this year he’s my supervisor for my final project and has helped me a lot to really shape the idea and direction of the project, as well as helping with some blocking issues I’ve had and helping arrange testing. Also, Almas B. Inspired me to include speech recognition into my project which players can use to navigate the menus, further lessening the time they need to use the keyboard and mouse, during a lecture for a different module when he built a text to speech program for an example.
Freedom to create
My favourite part of my course is how much freedom I get to essentially create whatever game I want for each module. There is always a general ‘focus’ to each module, e.g. make a multiplayer game, a 3D game in Unity (C++), a VR Game, a 2D Phaser (JavaScript) game etc. but beyond that you can make the game to fit any genre you feel like making. For example, I’ve made a first person shooter, a 2D football game, and a horror game to list a few which I think helped me to be a lot more creative and varied with my ideas and not just stick to making the same genre over and over again.
Plans for the future
I did a placement year last year at Cyclr where my role was to build ‘Connectors’, which are tools our partners use to easily make API calls and pass that data into different systems. The role consisted of writing JavaScript code to make HTTP requests and manipulate JSON data into more readable/usable formats. The placement helped me alot with project management and working to deadlines and encouraged me to now start my Uni work earlier and leave less to do right before deadlines. While on placement you can contact your supervisor if you have any concerns/issues, though I was fine so didn’t require it. I’m also still working part-time at Cyclr now while I finish my last year of Uni.
After university I plan to stay on in my job at Cyclr for the foreseeable future .
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